Title: Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes Release Date: October 6, 2009
Genre: Action
Rating: T for Teen
Rating: T for Teen
Platform: XBox 360
Publisher: LucasArts
Developer: Krome Studios
The animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars is one of the best things to happen to the Star Wars franchise in recent years. It has nice voice acting, good plots and some great character interactions. Unfortunately, Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes, a game based on the series, isn’t as good as its namesake.
In Republic Heroes, you get to play the role of just about every key figure in the series at some point, including Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Captain Rex. As these characters, you must foil a Separatist plot to create a super weapon that could spell doom for the Republic.
You would think that after the success of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the designers of this game would have adopted that game's over-the-shoulder perspective for this game. Unfortunately, this is not the case – instead, they went with a third-person perspective. This, more than anything else, drags the game down to the rating that it earns, because the perspective creates so many problems.
For starters, there is no way to adjust the camera angle you are viewing the action from like there is in many action games. As a result, the platform-jumping action that makes up certain parts of Republic Heroes gets extremely frustrating at times, as it's tough to judge exactly where to jump to avoid missing the ledge. As if that wasn't bad enough, there are quite a few times in this game where you get so far away from the camera during the action that it's tough to see what the heck is going on.
As for the controls, they're decent enough for what the game is. The Jedi and clone troopers have somewhat different controls, reflecting their different combat styles. The only gripe I have is that the clone troopers' aiming controls could use a little work. Basically, you fire by pointing the right control stick in whatever direction you want to shoot in. This feels kind of awkward to me, and definitely doesn't give you the same feeling of combat intensity as pressing the right trigger would. This is only aggravated by the aforementioned bad camera, which makes it tough to draw an accurate bead on enemies.
One cool feature of the game is the “droid jak,” which allows a Jedi character to jump on top of an enemy droid and control it for a certain time. For example, you can jump on a super battle droid and force it to march around shooting its allies, or you can take control of a chameleon droid and use it as your own personal mine-layer. It's a nice feature that adds some strategy to the action, which can get somewhat repetitive at times.
Another good thing the game has going for it is the feel of animated series. The voice actors from the series reprise their roles for the game, and I can't think of one major character they missed featuring in this game. Even the new bounty hunter character Cad Bane makes an appearance.
Unfortunately, none of the game's good points can make up for all of the frustration that the fixed third-person perspective causes. If it weren't for that, Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes could have been a decent title. As it is, though, it needs some serious fixing before it could be considered as worthy as the series it sprang from.
Overall Rating:
Christopher Mastey-Muzikreviews.com Video Game Reviewer
November 30, 2009
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